Vampire for Christmas (2 page)

Total
crap of course.

She
wouldn’t be attracted to him if he was the last man on Earth.
Shannon smiled to herself. He wasn’t even a man. She would have to
be down to the last vampire too before she would ever consider him
in that way.

Shannon
slipped a stake into the inside pocket of her thick black wool
jacket and another into the back pocket of her dark jeans. It was
always a good idea to be well armed when out on a hunt. She wasn’t
about to let the holiday season lure her into a false sense of
security. Wretched demonkind didn’t celebrate the occasion, and
some of her busiest times had been over the Christmas period.
Besides, the stakes weren’t just for use on the bad vampires.
Sometimes she considered using them on the apparently good vampires
too.

Shannon
opened the door.

Rafe
stood on the other side, six feet plus of dark handsome devil
perfectly capable of pushing every right button in a
woman.

At least,
every woman except her.

The left
side of his sensual mouth tugged into a half smile that revealed
the tip of a canine and his deep brown eyes slid up towards the
porch ceiling. Her eyes followed out of curiosity.

Mistletoe.

Her gaze
snapped back to him. He had to be kidding. He stared at her, dark
eyes locked on hers in a silent challenge, and rocked expectantly
on his heels. He clasped his hands behind his bottom, the action
dragging his long black coat back too, revealing the athletic
physique that his dark shirt failed to hide.

Shannon
stepped backwards into the safety of her house.

Rafe
frowned.

She could
almost hear what he was thinking, could read it in his eyes. She
didn’t care if he thought she was rude because she had never
invited him into her home. She had neglected to do so for good
reason. It was handy at times like these when he was making her
heart jitter and pulse race.

She was
not going to kiss him.

There
were a million reasons why, but she settled on the safety aspect
because her heart couldn’t overrule that one.

If she
abided by tradition and kissed him, she would be placing herself
firmly within his grasp, and that was a place she didn’t want to
be. What would start as a harmless festive kiss would end as a
bloodbath with his fangs in her throat. Just the thought of it
happening shook her deep inside, dredging up memories best left
forgotten and pain she had fought to erase. She would never let
anything like that happen again.

Never.

Rafe
continued to stare, his dark gaze cool but demanding.

Sometimes, Shannon wished the agency hadn’t paired them
together. She had never wanted to work with one of nature’s freaks.
She just wanted to kill them and get revenge for what they had done
to her and her family.

“
Never going to happen.” Shannon pushed past him, slammed the
door behind her, and locked it. She didn’t break her stride. Before
he could respond, she was at the end of her garden path and walking
towards the centre of town.

She
didn’t hear him move. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next he
was keeping pace beside her. Her heart leapt at his sudden
appearance.

“
I told you not to do that.” She drew her hand away from her
back pocket. It had jumped to the stake on instinct. One of these
days, he was going to surprise her and she was going to give him a
nasty surprise of her own.

“
No need for that.” He appeared on the other side of her, his
hand slipping over hers and easing it away from the stake. He
smiled at her, his cool fingers lingering against hers. “There is a
no staking your partner policy at the agency, remember?”

Shannon
snatched her hand back and wished she didn’t remember. It was the
only thing stopping her from killing him. A quiet voice at the back
of her mind whispered that it wasn’t the only reason she couldn’t
bring herself to stake him. She shooed it away.

“
So, where are we heading?” Rafe’s deep voice swept around her,
bathing her in warmth she tried to deny, and she kept her gaze
fixed ahead. If she pretended he wasn’t there, she might just make
it through the next few hours, and then she was home free. It was
one last mission.

For some
reason, that caused a dull ache to settle inside her.

She had
thought she would be happy. She should be happy. No more working
with the enemy. They were reassigning her to warmer climes and a
partner-free role. She had proven herself worthy of working alone,
just as she had wanted from the start of her career with the
agency, and she was finally getting that wish.

So why
wasn’t she happy?

“
Town,” Shannon said distractedly, frowning at the pavement and
trying to piece together an answer to her own question. There had
to be a reason and it couldn’t be the vampire walking beside her.
She had grown used to him. That’s all it was. He had become a sort
of friend. The only person she actually spoke to apart from her
handler and a few people at the agency, and she had never told them
a thing about herself. She had never talked them, not as she had to
Rafe. Shannon cursed herself. She should have kept her distance and
not gotten involved, just as she had planned, but two years was too
long to work with someone without saying anything to
them.

Rafe had
slipped in unnoticed, had passed the first of her defences and
somehow got her talking one night, and since then, she couldn’t
stop her mouth sometimes. Sometimes it all became too much and she
had to speak to someone, and he was always there, willing to listen
to her silly troubles and doubts about her ability to hunt, her
skill, and her future with the agency.

And he
always reassured her, and made her feel better.

“
Anywhere particular in town?” Rafe said and her attention
snapped back to him. She stared up at him, still half lost in her
thoughts, and found herself looking straight into his eyes. Windows
to the soul. Rafe’s hid nothing from her. They betrayed everything
that he was feeling, and sometimes it frightened her.

Not when
he was showing his vampire side. His pale eyes didn’t scare her or
the malice that she saw in them, the hunger for violence and
bloodshed. It was this side of him that scared her. The gentle
side. The one who looked at her with warmth and undeniable
affection.

“
Are you feeling alright?” He cocked his head to one side, his
gaze holding hers, sparkling with tender concern.

Shannon
forced her eyes down to the pavement and studied the cracks as she
walked, unable to bring her voice above a whisper.

“
I’m fine.”

There was
a long pause, full of expectation and unspoken things.

Sometimes, when this feeling washed over her, she had a sense
that he wanted to say something to her. He never had though, and
she often found herself wondering what it was he couldn’t put a
voice to.

“
So, where are we going? Into town, or beyond town... perhaps
you called me all the way out here on a freezing cold night just to
make me go gift shopping with you. If that is the case, I have to
say it is in poor taste, as I am a vampire... I do not celebrate
Christmas as you do.”

“
I don’t.” Shannon wished she could take those two words back.
They were going to cause questions that she didn’t want to answer.
She glanced at Rafe, briefly making eye contact, and then looked
away to her right, her gaze eating the streetlamp lit grass and
shrubs that she walked past. He sighed but said nothing. She waited
a moment longer, afraid that he might just be building up to it,
and then released the breath she had been holding. “The report
states that there was a demon sighting in the local cemetery just
outside the town centre.”

“
Cemetery?” Rafe sounded positively disgusted.

She
glanced at him again. He looked it too. He seemed to take it as a
personal affront whenever they had to hunt demons in places like
old churches, cemeteries and disused factories.

“
Some demons have no taste.”

Shannon
smiled. “Speak for yourself.”

He
frowned at her but it didn’t stick. It melted into a smile that
threatened to steal her breath and she averted her gaze again. What
was she doing? Her heart skittered about in her throat and she knew
he would be listening to it, and he would know that he was
affecting her. She could do this.

It was
just one more mission.

And then
she would be able to escape these feelings.

She was
not going to fall for him.

He was a
vampire. She was a hunter.

Her gaze
snuck back to him, studying his noble profile, and her heart
thudded hard against her chest.

There was
no love more forbidden than this.

****

Chapter 2

Shannon
jammed her hands into her jacket pockets and hunched up against the
wind. It had come out of nowhere when they had been halfway across
the small countryside town, near to the cemetery and stone church,
and it had only grown stronger when they had entered the hallowed
ground.

Rafe
didn’t seem to care.

But then,
he never seemed to care about much. Was that what being a vampire
was like? Carefree? Was that why they could kill a human without
even flinching, without a moment’s regret? She didn’t care about
the excuses every vampire spouted when she was about to sentence
them for murdering an innocent human. Liquid diet or not, it was
wrong to kill, especially since a vampire was perfectly capable of
feeding without indulging their perverse lust for tasting human
death.

Rafe was
her un-living example of that and she took great pleasure in
pointing that out to every vampire she killed, so they knew that
they had dug their own second grave.

Shannon
looked up at him where he stood on a stone sarcophagus, his long
black coat flapping out behind him in the gale and his short dark
hair flat against his head. He grinned into the wind.

“
Having fun?” she hollered up at him but the wind carried her
voice away. He frowned down at her and touched his ear, as though
asking her to repeat herself. The wind wasn’t that strong and his
hearing would have picked her up if she had only whispered. The
cocky smile on his handsome face said that he was waiting for her
to say something more polite before he answered. “Can you see
anything?”

He
shrugged and shook his head, and went back to challenging the wind.
She didn’t know how he could bear it when he was only wearing a
black shirt and jeans beneath his unbuttoned coat. She knew that he
could feel the cold, and that it drained his body heat. Last
winter, he had complained during every mission about how long it
would take him to regain his normal body temperature. From the
number of times he had bound her wounds during their partnership,
she could say that normal for him was cold for her. Somewhere
around room temperature. Right now, he had to be freezing. She was,
and her coat was buttoned up.

Rafe put
his booted foot out in front of him, bracing himself against the
wind, and leaned into it. He outstretched his arms, splaying his
fingers, and grinned, revealing short fangs.

The sight
of them didn’t bother her anymore. When she had first started
working with him, she had been surprised to see that his canines
were always slightly extended compared to hers. She had asked the
demon-hunting agency about it, curious because all the vampires she
had previously encountered had already been in their true guise,
and they had told her that it was a sign of his age. A young
vampire could appear completely human. The older they got, the more
their true nature began to shine through. How old was Rafe? He
looked to be in his late thirties, but that was misleading since
vampires didn’t age. She hadn’t asked the agency how old he was. It
seemed rude to ask them such things, even if Rafe was a vampire and
not someone she was likely to ask about himself.

At least,
she had felt that way back when they had first met.

Since
then, she had asked him things about himself from time to time, but
only small things, worded in careful ways so she wasn’t directly
asking about him. She had danced around so many things, and he had
done the same in return, leading her in circles, as though he knew
that she wanted to know about him but wouldn’t tell her until she
asked outright.

Shannon
ran her gaze down his lithe figure. He looked so human sometimes.
It had caught her off guard several times in the early days of
their partnership. It was no wonder vampires could blend so easily
into the unsuspecting human population. Seeing how he could move
through a crowd, could come close to so many people, within easy
killing reach, had boosted her resolve to protect the world from
his kind and the demons.

Back
then, she had thought it even needed protecting from
Rafe.

Now, she
could see that she had been wrong. It pained her to acknowledge
such a thing, but she was feeling strong enough to admit it to
herself. Rafe wasn’t out to kill anymore. He wasn’t one of the bad
vampires. He was one of the enlightened ones, those who had found
out they could co-exist with humans and only take what they needed
to survive. She still didn’t like it, but she couldn’t deny the
right to live to those who had fought their nature to become more
human. The moment they crossed the line though, she would be there
with a sharp stake to send them back to the grave, this time
permanently.